Bergquist, Daniel
- Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
It is increasingly apparent that global capitalism is not capable of generating fair and sustainabledevelopment. This has been criticized by system perspectives in natural as well as social sciences.General Systems Theory (GST) emphasizes flows of energy and materials between systems, andenables descriptive quantification of North-South relations. Meanwhile, World System Theory (WST) ismore explanatory, in concentrating on the history and asymmetric power relations of the globalcapitalist system. Both perspectives have shown that global trade results in asymmetric accumulationprocesses, among other reasons due to ways of establishing value that underestimate the contributionby people and the environment. In this paper it is proposed that this problem be eased by determiningwhat feedback mechanisms in the world system are positive and negative, and that this in turn may beoperationalized by prioritizing processes that facilitate maximum empower. This calls for newapproaches to global trade that are ecologically realist, and acknowledge unequal distributive aspectsof resources and power. However, GST offers only limited articulation of the concept of politicalpower. Similarly, WST proponents seldom specify what is being accumulated in world trade. Thus,whereas GST with its emergy concept provides a means for calculating flows and interactions, i.e., toquantify accumulation, WST offers a framework to emphasize power relations within different parts ofthe world system. However, there are intra-disciplinary difficulties in communicating the outcomefrom the two approaches. In this paper, critical arguments derived from this gap are presented,emphasizing opportunities and constraints in theory and terminology. The ambition is that thosecritical arguments will give an entrance and hints where pedagogical and information skills should begiven first priority, in order to help each approach to understand the other, and ultimately pushresearch towards a more transdisciplinary understanding of emergy accumulation.
Published in
Title: Emergy synthesis 5 : theory and applications of the emergy methodology : Proceedings from the Fifth Biennial Emergy Conference, Gainesville, Florida
Publisher: The Center for Environmental Policy
Conference
EMERGY SYNTHESIS 5: Theory and Applications of the Emergy Methodology. Proceedings from the Fifth Biennial Emergy Conference, Gainesville, Florida. December 2009
SLU Authors
Rydberg, Torbjörn
- Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
UKÄ Subject classification
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/116960